Baseball|Aaron Judge Hits Two Homers, One Very Long, as Yankees Crush Orioles

Supported by

Aaron Judge Hits Two Homers, One Very Long, as Yankees Crush Orioles

Image

The Yankees’ Aaron Judge hitting a 495-foot solo home run in the sixth inning. He also had a two-run shot in the seventh, his 21st homer of the year.CreditCreditAnthony Gruppuso/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

By Wallace Matthews

June 11, 2017

Between 4,500 and 5,000 home runs will be hit in an average major league season. Some will be bombs, some wall-scrapers. Some will be game winners; others, footnotes with little impact.

But very few will make two dugouts full of professional ballplayers behave as if they were Little Leaguers.

Aaron Judge hit one of those home runs Sunday at Yankee Stadium. Many remarkable things happened in the game, and many more over the past week in Yankee Stadium, but none compared with the sight of a baseball arcing high into a clear Bronx sky and returning to earth nearly 500 feet from where it started.

Shortstop Didi Gregorius leaped to the top step of the Yankees’ dugout and cupped his fingers around his eyes as he stared out toward left field, as if he needed binoculars to follow the flight of the ball. Aaron Hicks clapped his hands against the top of his head in disbelief.

And catcher Gary Sanchez, who usually relies on a Spanish-speaking interpreter in interviews, did not wait for a non-Spanish-speaking reporter’s question to be translated before responding with a single word: “Wow!”

“How could you not get excited over a home run like that?” Manager Joe Girardi said.

If one swing of the bat could overshadow a game in which the Yankees scored 14 runs, or a three-game series in which they outscored the Baltimore Orioles by 38-8, or a streak in which the Yankees won five games from the Orioles and the Boston Red Sox, it was the swing that Judge took against Logan Verrett in the sixth inning of the Yankees’ 14-3 win over the visiting Orioles on Sunday.

The sound of impact left no doubt that the ball was leaving the park. The only question was where it would come down.

Image

The path of Mickey Mantle’s 565-foot home run at the old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., in 1953.CreditAssociated Press

According to Statcast, Major League Baseball’s tracking technology, Judge’s blast was 495 feet, the longest in the majors this season. It traveled at 119 miles per hour, not quite in the class of the home run he hit on Saturday off Chris Tillman, which was clocked at 121 m.p.h., the hardest-hit ball in the majors this year. And it reached an altitude of 124 feet, which put it momentarily on a level with, if not above, the facade ringing the top of the stadium.

No one in the Yankees clubhouse could remember seeing anything like it.

“Did it go over the bleachers?” Sanchez asked. “I’ve seen him hit home runs before, but that one was just incredible.”

Left fielder Brett Gardner said, “I’d like to know what that feels like — me and everybody else.”

Girardi remembered being behind the plate when Carlos Delgado hit one into the upper deck at Rogers Centre in Toronto, a pretty good poke, but decided Judge had it beaten.

“That might be the furthest one I’ve ever seen,” he said.

In time, Judge’s shot may be ranked with the one Mickey Mantle hit at the old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., in 1953, measured at 565 feet, officially the longest home run ever hit. Others might point to the one Mantle hit off the facade in right field at the original Yankee Stadium, which missed sailing out onto River Avenue by just a few feet.

For now, Judge’s home run — his 20th of the season and, incidentally, only his first of the game — will be talked about even more than a weekend in which the Yankees obliterated the Orioles, won their fifth straight and concluded a run of 13 straight games against their American League East rivals, with eight victories in that span.

The way the Yankees have played, and especially hit, over the past two weeks has clarified where they stand in relation to the rest of the division.

So far, they are head and shoulders above the competition.

Over the six-game homestand, the Yankees lost only the series opener against the Red Sox on Tuesday. In the other games, the Yankees outscored the opposition by 55-9. They scored 16 runs against the Orioles on Saturday, but Sunday’s game was probably more impressive since the Yankees’ starter, Chad Green, was a last-minute replacement for the pushed-back and struggling Masahiro Tanaka, and was expected to last only about 50 pitches.

It did not matter, because the bats took care of business. The Yankees had taken a 5-0 lead by the time Orioles starter Kevin Gausman had thrown a dozen pitches, the early outburst capped by a three-run homer by Sanchez in the first.

Green struggled with deep pitch counts and allowed the Orioles to score three runs in the third. But Girardi went to his bullpen, using four relief pitchers, and his hitters went to work.

Matt Holliday drove in two runs with a single in the fourth inning. Two batters after Judge’s blast, Starlin Castro hit a two-run homer.

In the seventh, Judge hit another one, not as long but nearly as impressive as his first, a low line drive that just kept going into the right-center-field seats. He now has 21 home runs, the most in the major leagues, in 209 at-bats.

The red-hot Aaron Hicks doubled in two more runs as the Yankees pounded out 15 hits, and 44 in the three-game sweep.

Asked if he even bothered to watch the flight of his mammoth homer, the normally sheepish Judge just shook his head.

“No need,” he said. “If I know it’s going over the fence, I’m just going to start jogging around the bases and just get back in the dugout. It means nothing, to be honest.”

He meant the distance, not the effect. That has been palpable throughout the league.

“Shots like that are why he’s leading the league in All-Star votes,” Gardner said. “And if they voted on M.V.P. today, he’d win that, too.”

INSIDE PITCH

Joe Girardi said the immediate future of Masahiro Tanaka would not hinge on his performance in Monday’s scheduled start against the light-hitting Los Angeles Angels. Asked what the Yankees would do if Tanaka, who has lost five straight starts, did not pitch well on Monday, Girardi said: “Start him on Saturday. That’s our plan.”

Correction:

An article on Monday about the Yankees’ 14-3 win over the Baltimore Orioles misstated, in some copies, the number of relief pitchers the Yankees used in the game. It was four, not five.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Judge Goes Exceptionally Deep as Yankees Crush the Orioles Again. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe